Can News Anchor's Face Help Launch Candidate Into Oval Office?

October 26, 1986|By Howard Means of the Sentinel Staff

WASHINGTON — He's no Helen of Troy, whose face launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Ilium, but ABC News anchor Peter Jennings might have done something nearly as profound with his face -- helped voters choose a president. If psychologist Brian Mullen and his fellow researchers are right, Jennings did it with a smile.

The study, reported on in the August issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was divided into two parts. In the first, subjects viewed silent videotapes of Jennings, Dan Rather of CBS and Tom Brokaw of NBC as they read news items involving Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale during the last eight days of the 1984 campaign. The subjects then rated the newscasters on a 37-point scale of facial expressiveness, ranging from

''extremely negative'' to ''extremely positive.''

The results: Rather exhibited the least expressiveness in reporting on either candidate, Brokaw came in a close second, and Jennings, while remaining impassive on Mondale, was strongly positive whenever Reagan's name arose. In lay terms, he smiled a lot when talking about the incumbent.

What's more, of the three major news anchors, Jennings exhibited the least positive facial expressions in general. Except when reporting on Reagan, he was a deadpan.

That much of the study, at least, reveals nothing new. A similar project in 1976 found David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite and Harry Reasoner favoring Jimmy Carter, while John Chancellor and Barbara Walters smiled on Gerald Ford. Newscasters are human, after all, and a smile is not always a conscious act.

What makes the current study unique and potentially of extraordinary value is the second part -- the new ground it plowed.

After getting ratings of facial expressiveness, the researchers polled a random sampling of residents in five cities on their viewing habits and voting preferences.

The results here: Viewers who took their news from CBS and NBC voted for Reagan about 62 percent of the time, a little greater than his overall percentage of the national vote in 1984. Those who watched Jennings and ABC went for Reagan an astounding 80 percent of the time. In every one of the five cities studied, ABC viewers went with Reagan more ardently than did NBC or CBS viewers.

For my money the researchers are hasty on the trigger when they write that the ''most plausible'' explanation of their findings is that ''newscaster bias had a causal effect on viewer attitudes.''

Ask any intense student of the human face -- professional gamblers, for instance: The smile is an incredibly complex interplay of facial muscles and neural messages, capable of expressing many emotions other than pleasure.

TV viewers aren't anymore masochistic than they have to be, either. They're apt to settle on the newscaster whose facial expressions reward their own political biases.

Nor is anyone trying to mount an argument that Jennings determined the outcome of the 1984 election. If Rather and Brokaw had grinned from ear to ear when Mondale's name came up, and Jennings sniffed like an English butler at the very mention of Reagan, the incumbent still would have won, and won big.

Yet, a smile does say something. On the face of a trusted figure such as a network newscaster it may say just enough to convince us to vote one way or another. Such a smile on such a face is an example of what R.E. Petty and J.T. Cacioppo have labeled a ''peripheral route to persuasion . . . persuasion occuring without the deliberate, conscious consideration of arguments,'' in Mullen's words.